The people formerly known as the audience

Blogger and journalist Jay Rosen has written a piece on his blog, PressThink, in the spirit of the Cluetrain Manifesto titled "The People Formerly Known as the Audience". He writes about how people like you and me are not just content to be fed content and information from broadcasters, media houses and suchlike. We are also choosing to make that content ourselves and disseminate it through blogs, podcasts and other means. It is a post about the empowerment of "the people formerly known as the audience" and the power of the new media that is so freely available.

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.

Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.

Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.

You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.

A highly centralized media system had connected people “up?? to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across?? to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.